and as such must be received with
critical caution.

The need for caution is further emphasized by the important circumstance
that of all the phenomena described, only those most susceptible of
mundane interpretation were witnessed by Glanvill or Mompesson. All of
the more extraordinary--the great body with the red and glaring eyes,
the levitated children, etc.--came to the narrator from second or third
or fourth hand sources not always clearly indicated, and doubtless
uneducated and superstitious persons, such as peasants or servants,
whose fears would lend wings to their imagination.

Keeping these facts before us, what do we find? We find that, so far
from supporting the supernatural view, the evidence points to a
systematic course of fraud and deceit carried out, not by the drummer,
not by Mompesson and Glanvill (as many of that generation were unkind
enough to suggest), not by the Mompesson servants, but by the Mompesson
children, and particularly by the oldest child, a girl of ten.

It was about the children that the disturbances centered, it was in
their room that the manifestations usually took place, and--what should
have served to direct suspicion to them at once--when, in the hope of
affording them relief, their father separated them, sending the youngest
to lodge with a neighbor and taking the oldest into his own room, it was
remarked that the neighbor's house immediately became the scene of
demoniac activity, as did the Squire's apartment, which had previously
been virtually undisturbed. Here and now developed a phenomenon that
places little Miss Mompesson on a par with the celebrated Fox sisters,
for her father's bed chamber was turned into a seance room in which
messages were rapped out very much as messages have been rapped out ever
since the fateful night in 1848 that saw modern spiritism ushered into
the world.

Glanvill's personal testimony, the most precise and circumstantial in
the entire case, strongly, albeit unwittingly, supports this view of the
affair. It appears that he passed only one night in the haunted house,
and of his several experiences there is none that cannot be set down to
fraud plus imagination, with the children the active agents. Witness the
following from his story of what he heard and beheld in the
oft-mentioned "children's room":

"At this time it used to haunt the children, and that as soon as they
were laid. They went to bed the night I was there about eight of the
clo